This is a typical Irish customer service response. A company has a problem with a system and so makes the customer jump through hoops to sort the problem rather than fixing the problem themselves. I had a similar issue trying to buy a family day ticket in the remote outpost of Ballsbridge a few months ago. The TVM at Lansdowne Road (unmanned at the time) wouldn't sell me one and the local ticket agent didn't have any in stock. So as a result we ended up on the buses for the day much to the disappointment of my son who is a train nut.
This is probably discriminatory as you are preventing families from using the service at times of the day when stations are unmanned without having to pay above the required fare.
If there is a revenue issue, it would seem somewhat reasonable to only allow the machines to issue child tickets if one or more adult tickets were purchase but even that would be a pain for a lot of people who would be travelling on their own pass and buying tickets for their children.
If fare abuse is so widespread, there it would have to be cost positive to deploy extra staff to inspect tickets. I never see an inspector on any of the trains I take apart a from ticket collector scheduled on the 0545 from Sligo between Mullingar and Maynooth. A couple of years back, they used to put an inspector the commuter trains I used once or twice a week. But when the fine is only 100 euro and you can deploy the Broombridge excuse anyway, why would you regularly pay a third of the price of the fine when you can get away with it.
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